Steve Bloomfield meets Kenya's Pamela Jelimo, a reluctant superstar

Billboards have sprung up across Nairobi in the past few months promoting a new sports radio station. Each advert features a picture of a different sports star celebrating victory. Tiger Woods pumps his fist, an ecstatic Serena Williams jumps in the air, Lewis Hamilton joyously sprays champagne.

Then there is 19-year-old Pamela Jelimo. She is winning the 800m, a flock of opponents trailing in her wake. She looks stern, hardly a flicker of emotion crossing her face. Winning, the picture seems to say, is normal.

At the start of 2008, Jelimo was a struggling sprinter who by her own admission had "lost hope". By the end of the year she had become the world's best middle-distance runner, winning every single 800m race she entered.

Kenya has produced athletics greats from Kip Keino to Paul Tergat, but few have captured the country's imagination like Jelimo. An Olympic gold in the 800m last year in Beijing brought her fame; a month later she won her fortune.

After the Olympics she returned to the Grand Prix circuit. She was a serious contender for the Golden League jackpot, a $1m prize shared between the female athletes who won all six of their Golden League meetings. Jelimo had won five out of five, as had the Croatian high jumper Blanka Vlasíc. In the final meeting of the series in Brussels Jelimo won her race, but Vlasíc came second. The jackpot was all Jelimo's.

The response back in Kenya blew her away. Jelimo wasn't just an Olympic hero, she was a rich Olympic hero. Her prize is more than 2,500 times the average monthly wage in Kenya.

On arriving back in Nairobi, she was whisked off to meet the president, Mwai Kibaki, and prime minister Raila Odinga. Then it was on to Kapsabet, the farming town high in the North Rift Valley where Jelimo grew up with six sisters and three brothers. Thousands filled the streets, chanting her name. Men waved placards screaming "Pamela, Marry Me!" and children sang songs praising her. The main thoroughfare was renamed Pamela Jelimo Street. "It was strange," she recalls, "but it was marvellous."

For a millionaire, Jelimo lives an austere life. The house she shares with her husband, 22-year-old fellow athlete Peter Murrey, is simple: a one-bedroom bungalow on a patch of farmland high up in the Rift Valley. Calendars and family pictures hang from the walls of the reception room, as do certificates noting Pamela's triumphs. There is a wooden dresser with gold plastic handles and a patterned brown three-piece suite. The only sign of wealth is a 42-inch plasma television.

Jelimo is trying to keep her life as normal as possible but she is stopped for autographs almost every day and on her rare forays into Nairobi her agent, Barnaba Korir, has to hire bodyguards to protect her from an eager public. She has shunned the media, refusing all requests for interviews, bar one which she did with Murrey to put off the placard-waving, marriage-proposing men who hoped Jelimo might be their meal ticket.

It took several weeks to persuade Jelimo to agree to an interview with OSM – the first time she has sat down with a foreign journalist. "I just want to concentrate on my training," she says by way of apology, when we finally meet at her Kapsabet home. She is just back from her second training run of the day. It is late afternoon and the brilliant green hills of the North Rift, which back onto her garden, are bathed in sunshine.

She disappears into the kitchen to boil the kettle, returning after a few minutes with a flask of hot, milky tea. While she is gone, Murrey tells me about the book he is reading, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. It's an unusual choice in a country where church and daily prayer are an almost unquestioned part of life. "I don't agree with it, but it is good to challenge your views," he says, putting Dawkins down on the coffee table next to a copy of the Bible.

The two have known each other since they were children and married in 2007. Murrey still has ambitions of being a successful athlete but, so far, he is more than happy to play second fiddle. It is a refreshing attitude in a country where wives are still expected to stay at home and raise a family while husbands go out to work.

From an early age, Jelimo knew she could run fast. She excelled in school athletics and was talent spotted three years ago at a meet in Eldoret, the commercial capital of the North Rift, some 25 miles from Kapsabet. In Kenya the main athletics teams all belong to state institutions. The police force signed her up, although she didn't have to do too much actual policing. "You have to at least do one or two things but they give you enough time to train. They cannot give you too much work."

So, no arrests then? She laughs. "No! No! I couldn't do that."

She won her first big event, the 400m at the Africa junior championships in Burkina Faso, in 2007, but failure in the final of her other event, the 200m, caused her to think again. "I was last," she says with a laugh and a shake of the head. Even her times at 400m, while impressive for a junior in Africa, were off the pace internationally.

Kenyans have traditionally excelled at middle and long distances – not sprinting. "The middle-distance runners were my role models. I discussed it with my coaches and we decided to move to 800m."

It was a smart choice. She won her first gold at the All Africa games last year, beating Mozambique's former Olympic champion Maria Mutola along the way, before entering her first race in Europe, a grand prix meeting in the Dutch town of Hengelo. Few of those who lined up alongside her knew who the Kenyan teenager was. Less than two minutes later they were trailing in her wake as Jelimo stormed home in first place in 1:55.76, breaking the world junior record. "They were surprised, for sure," she says of her opponents. The victories kept coming, but the Olympics was her target.

"I co-ordinated my training programme so I did not get burnout. I wanted to win at the Olympics. I had that motivation. I thought, 'If I win that gold, it will be something to be remembered.'"

It will be remembered, but perhaps not as much as the million dollars. Mention Jelimo in Nairobi and the subject of money immediately comes up. She doesn't like talking about it though. "No no no, nothing concerning my money!" she says when I bring it up. She put it in a bank account in Monaco and, so far, hasn't spent a penny. Within hours of her victory, her agent was fielding so many calls from businessmen and opportunists eager for her to invest in a new property or company that he had to turn his phone off.

For now, Jelimo is happy to watch the interest accumulate. "After a few years I can maybe start my own project," she says. "In Eldoret we have so many supermarkets, so many rental houses. I cannot go to Eldoret and decide to build rental houses there because we have so many. I have to choose some new things."

A decade ago there were nowhere near as many supermarkets, rental properties or office blocks in Eldoret, the largest town in the North Rift with a population of nearly 200,000. In the past few years it has seen a huge amount of investment, almost all of it from Jelimo's fellow athletes.

Most of Kenya's athletes come from the North Rift and as they have returned home, often clutching tens of thousands of pounds in appearance fees, sponsorship and winnings, many have started investing in property. "Eldoret has a completely new face," says Barnaba. "Almost all the tall buildings are built by athletes."

Our driver, Joshua, takes us on a tour of the town, pointing out which properties belong to which athletes. We pass a school belonging to Daniel Komen (3,000m world record holder), a five-storey shopping centre owned by Joyce Chepchumba (winner of the London, New York and Tokyo marathons) and office blocks recently built by Tegla Loroupe (world record holder at 20, 25 and 30km cross country).

"There was nothing here before," Joshua says, as we pass another large house protected by a seven-foot-high concrete wall. He gestures towards it. "Janeth Jepkosgei," he says.

The Kip Keino stadium in Eldoret is where Jelimo's athletics career began. The stadium, halfway up a hill outside of the town centre, has small brick and iron-sheet stands along two sides and grass embankments at the ends. It was here in 2006 that she won the 200m in a weekend race open to schoolgirls and amateurs.

On a recent Saturday, more than a thousand athletes took part in a similar event, hoping to catch the eye of the coaches, agents and sponsors who sat on white plastic chairs in the VIP section of the main stand.

While athletes have poured money into Eldoret real estate, little appears to have been spent at the stadium. The track is laid with red dirt, fresh white chalk divides the lanes. By the end of the 10,000m the runners' legs are splattered with chalk and clay. The hurdles used for the steeplechase are old and crooked. The starting pistol stops working, so the starter bangs two bits of wood together.

There are problems at the end of the races too. A team of eight timers, stopwatches in hand, collectively provide the official times for each athlete. After each race one of the timers shouts out "number one" and everyone else yells back with the winner's time. Then he does the same for the runner-up, and so on. For the 100m heats the disparity between one timer's number and another's is as much as three-tenths of a second. The main official chooses a number roughly in the middle and moves on.

One of those sitting in the VIP area is Daniel Komen. At the height of his career, in the mid-1990s, Komen was earning several thousand dollars each race. In a single grand prix, he says, he won $250,000. Komen bought properties in Nairobi and the UK, as well as several in Eldoret, where he now owns a 300-acre farm, a six-storey block of flats, and two private schools. His parents were both farmers, not particularly well-off. "Sports has changed my life," he says with some understatement.

The money, and the way they have spent it, has made athletes here part of the establishment. Mothers ask them to pay school fees, elders ask them to help fund funerals. When the community asks for a contribution, they see it as their duty to help.

Those communities have suffered terribly in recent years. More than 1,300 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their homes following the flawed presidential elections at the end of 2007. Reports later indicated that much of the violence in the Rift Valley between the Kikuyu and Kalenjin peoples had been planned by leading politicians and financed by local businessmen. International Crisis Group alleged that rich Rift Valley athletes had helped to bankroll some of the militia groups. Athletes vigorously denied any involvement in the violence and pointed out that many of them were unable to stick to their training schedules because of the unrest. More than a year on, it is a subject no one in Eldoret wants to talk about.

A deal struck in February 2008 between Kibaki and Odinga, then the opposition leader, saw the two men agree to share power. The deal ended the violence but the underlying problems have not gone away. The coalition has been rocked by corruption scandals and a failure to deal with land issues. Jelimo's meeting with Kibaki and Odinga was one of the few occasions when the two rivals have been seen in public together.

On the surface things appear to have returned to normal in Eldoret, but it wouldn't take much to light the fuse again. "It is like a volcano," Barnaba Korir told me.

Those involved in athletics here insist that there has been no trouble between coaches and runners from different parts of the country. During the post-election violence, Jelimo was training in Embu, a majority Kikuyu area, without any problem. "In Kenya we have differences," Jelimo admits. "But when you unite, do the right thing, everything is going to be fine."

The team which represented Kenya at the Olympics included athletes from several different communities. "One of the things that unites Kenyans is athletics," said Jelimo. And it's true that her celebrity is not limited to Kalenjin areas – Kikuyus are just as proud of her achievements.

Her goal this summer is to provide more moments of unity. The world record for the 800m currently stands at 1:53.28. By the end of last summer Jelimo's personal best was down to 1:54.01. "I have tried several times but it's not easy. Can you imagine? Taking one second off it is a problem." She leans back in the armchair and laughs. "It's not easy, it's not easy." She doesn't think breaking her personal best will be too hard though. "For sure, I'd be very disappointed [not to]. By the end of June. Maybe by the beginning."

It doesn't quite work out that way. By the middle of June she has lost her 100% record, coming sixth at an event in Rabat and seventh in Eugene, Oregon. Her time in Eugene is a full 11 seconds outside her personal best. Korir and her coaches withdrew her from the European season and brought her back to Kapsabet to focus on August's World Championships in Berlin. Jelimo's poor times pierced the aura of invincibility she built up in 2008 but her team are not worried yet. "She will be ready for the World Championships," Korir says with confidence. "You'll see, she will be ready."

After we finish talking Jelimo wanders outside to hang up the washing, placing clothes over the wire fence that surrounds the compound. Unlike most Kenyans with money, she has no domestic staff. Her life is as normal as it can be for a millionaire Olympic champion who is still a teenager.

"My career comes first. Why do I need to invest? Some people here do not understand. For now, I want to focus on my training and my running, but nothing else at the moment."

One project can't wait though. There are too many children in Kapsabet and too few schools to educate them. Jelimo pays school fees for several of her siblings and a handful of cousins but her plan is to build a school: "A very nice school that will motivate people."

Parents tend to give the education of boys priority over the schooling of girls. "A girl might go to primary school for one, two, three years and then drop out. They have no money so they say, 'Oh I might get married.' It's a big problem. What can we do?"

She answers her own question. "Investing in education is not expensive." The school, and an education charity that will pay school fees for local girls, will be launched later this year.

For all her talk about focusing on her career, she is already planning for the future. Korir thinks Jelimo and her husband should try for scholarships at an American university. He used to be an athlete too, a 1,500m runner with Olympic dreams. He picked up an injury at the national trials for the Barcelona Games in 1992 and never raced again. His university education helped him move into business.

Even if Jelimo retires tomorrow she shouldn't ever have money worries. But she knows what she will do when her career comes to an end. "I will sit in an office and work, a profession. That is what I want to do. It will be normal."